The Radio Magician and Other Stories (21 page)

A few minutes search revealed no tampering within the maintenance tunnels. There weren’t vids in them though. Still crouched by the entrance, Redmond chewed his lip. The closer he got to the segment with the elevated carbon dioxide, the more nervous he became. Catching Grant in between doors was too easy. In fact, this was Grant’s style, to let Redmond think he was winning until the end.

Something rattled beneath his hand. He threw himself backwards, slamming a shoulder into the wall in the process. Flat on the floor. Gun ready. Breathing in gasps through his mouth. He laughed in relief when the bot reemerged from the tunnel. It rolled on its hidden wheels to the corridor’s middle, twirled until it faced him, its tiny vid eyes unblinkingly aimed. Redmond’s laugh died in his throat. When the crew was awake and they all busied themselves with their two week regimen, the bots almost never came out. He could ignore them, but now he realized he was awake during bot time.

The machine pirouetted, then rolled down the corridor back the way Redmond had come. He laid his head on the deck, weak with relief.

He pushed himself off the floor. Another few minutes, and he would have him. Redmond licked his lips. The long feud would be over. Dimly he considered again how he’d explain this to the rest of the crew. He didn’t worry about punishment. Grant was the dangerous one, the diabolical one.
Grant
had broken protocol by emerging from the pod too soon.
Grant
had reprogrammed the computer to hide himself; that would show his intent. Surely the crew would understand. Now that he was this close, Redmond almost felt sorry for him. A great career wrecked by unchecked passion.

He reached the second to last airlock. Trembling, he rechecked his gun. Tranquilizer dart ready. Safety off.

As he pressed the button, he glanced up. The status light above the door was out. Time slowed.
Not
out. A piece of tape covered it, one edge curling. He didn’t have to pull it off to know the light glowed red. There was no air in the chamber beyond. Time nearly stopped; he turned, ran, each stride taking minutes to finish, the door at the other end impossibly far away. He thought, how long do I have to cover fifty feet? Did I take two seconds to start running, or five? How thoroughly did Grant subvert the computer? Enough to lure him down the corridor. Enough to hide the vacuum in that segment. Enough to create a subtle bait in an elevated carbon dioxide count in the chamber.

A klaxon screamed an alert. Two steps from the airlock, one step. He was through. Hit the button to close the door, which started its lumberous trip. Grabbed an access panel handle. How many seconds?

Wind, then a roar, tearing at him,
sucking
him back. Feet off the floor. Mouth open to equalize the pressure.

Very slow time. Hours in his head until the door closed behind him. Blood flowing from one ear, trickling into the corner of his mouth. Air cascading through the vents to replace the loss. Emergency lights pulsing in the ceiling. More klaxons, a virtual chorus shouting around him.

Then time caught up. Redmond let go of the handle, slid to the floor. Told the computer to shut down the alarms. He couldn’t move his left arm. Carefully he felt his shoulder; it wasn’t shaped right, a dislocation.

Grant hadn’t been in the segment at all. It was a trap.

On Redmond’s visor, numbers and reports scrolled past, the ship reacting to the segment’s emergency. Attitude jets fired, nudging the
Atonement
back on course. External repair bots activated and rushed to seal whatever hole Grant had created. How Grant had fooled the computer into ignoring the damage at first was a puzzle. Redmond flicked from system to system. Nearly every part of the ship responded to the damage. Medcentral kicked into high alert, poised to warm a crew if needed. Every bot on board looked to be on the move. He couldn’t track the commands being issued, and through the blizzard of numbers, he searched for Grant. It all came down to Grant who hated Redmond so much he’d risked the integrity of the entire ship to get him. How could he know that blowing that segment wouldn’t have collapsed the entire corridor? Every door behind Redmond had been open. If he hadn’t closed the airlock that saved his life, half the
Atonement
could have explosively decompressed. This was beyond any feud.

Redmond dragged himself upright. As soon as the computer ferreted out Grant’s meddling, he’d find him and deal with him. Briefly he considered waking the crew himself. With forty-eight extra helpers, they’d neutralize Grant in a hurry.

No. That wouldn’t be good. In their lifetime of battle, the only rule that couldn’t be broken was that it remained private. Only Redmond could hurt Grant, and only Grant could hurt Redmond. When they were eighteen and playing football, Grant took on a linebacker who was going to blindside Redmond. Strained all the ligaments in Grant’s left knee. Redmond had watched the video later, seen how Grant had broke his pattern to save him. Grant took an injury rather than letting someone else hurt Redmond. On the next play, Redmond went purposely low on a block and snapped the linebacker’s ankle.

No, he wanted to see Grant himself, to look him in the face before he pulled the trigger. There would be no outside help. Redmond’s arm hung awkwardly at his side as he walked toward the sleepbay. The gun he carried loosely in the other hand.

Two Deaf Policemen Heard the Noise

At first Redmond didn’t hear the whispering voice. He had turned his earplug down low to tune out the computer’s constant yammering.

“The doors are locked, you bastard.”

Redmond paused. It was Grant, his raspy breathing filling Redmond’s ear.

“You almost killed everyone with that stunt,” said Redmond, forcing himself to speak calmly.

“If you wouldn’t have screwed with the computers, the doors behind you would have closed. Nobody was at risk.”

The computer beeped. “Program done,” it announced. A report popped up, showing the changes Grant had made to the system. Redmond reactivated Grant as a crew member, and the computer showed his location in the living quarters lounge, directly behind the south sleepbay. Another adjustment, and the vid showed the true image. Grant stood in the middle of the lounge, his hands on his hips. So he’d only been one door away when Redmond had awakened. He swallowed. Had Grant got there just before Redmond had dogged the door, or had he been in the sleepbay before Redmond revived?

“What the hell did you do to the bots?” said Grant.

Redmond ran a dozen scenarios through his head. With the decompression as evidence, immobilizing Grant would look like an act of good will. The crew would give him a medal. Redmond could leave a record of the events and wake with the rest of the crew, a hero.

In the vid, Grant moved sideways through the room, his eyes intent on one wall. He didn’t look seventy-three years older than when Redmond had seen him last. His hair was dark, still messy from the long sleep, and his face still baby-like, which belied his biological age of twenty-nine. He carried himself gracefully, like a spider, Redmond thought. One of those garden spiders with long legs that moved from thread to thread with perfect certainty.

“What’s wrong with the bots?” Grant said again.

“What do you mean?” said Redmond. Grant’s ghostly image floated in the air before him. Redmond cut through the gymnasium’s bare space—all the equipment was stored—and into the hallway that would bring him to the lounge’s back door. If he jammed it like he’d done the one into the sleeproom, Grant wouldn’t be able to get out, even if he talked the ship into cooperating.

“Damn it! A bot’s hunting me!” yelled Grant, an unusual tenor in his voice. He was frightened.

Something moved at the bottom of the display. In the middle of the empty gym, Redmond stopped walking so he could concentrate on the image. Grant maneuvered himself behind a couch, his posture wary. A bot slid through one corner of the picture, almost out of view. Redmond sent a command, and the vid went wide angle.

“What’s it holding?” said Redmond. A multi-limbed extension had unfolded from the bot’s round shell, and it gripped an odd tool. Grant held himself taut, ready to spring away, and his normally graceful movements became panicked. The bot rolled a couple feet to its left, then rotated so the tool pointed at Grant, but the vid resolution wasn’t good enough for Redmond to see what it was. Hands on the couch’s top, Grant sidled away, apprehension on his face. Redmond flicked through ship data until he ran into a block. Puzzled, he tried another query. Blank. All information on the bots was locked up. It wouldn’t access. This wasn’t his work; it wasn’t Grant’s either. Redmond tried a data runaround. Nothing. A backdoor he’d built into the programming was closed too. Tension rose in his throat. The bot skittered around a chair, keeping the tool aimed.

Redmond said, “Stay low. Stay away from it.” He pressed the earplug hard against his head so he could hear better. Grant’s quick breathing rasped.

A pop.

“Damn it!” Grant clutched his chest. “It shot me.” He took a shaky step toward the door, then fell. The bot withdrew the extension before heading for a tunnel.

“Grant! Grant!” Redmond ran toward the lounge, Grant’s vital signs displayed in the air in front of him. Breathing and pulse slowed. Only his hands and the top of his head were visible; the couch hid the rest. One hand clenched. Then he spasmed for a couple seconds.

And Came and Killed the Two Dead Boys

The airlock swung ponderously closed before Redmond could get to it. He pounded on it, his hardest blows failing to elicit more than dull slaps. Even as he punched the button to open it, he knew it was useless. The heads-up display revealed more and more of the ship’s control locking out. None of them responded.

Across the gym, the door he’d come in was closed too.

Almost weeping, he watched Grant’s vitals retreating to straight lines. How had this happened? Who else had tinkered with the computers? He could have sworn that only he and Grant were capable of this kind of work.

When the bot tunnel door squeaked open, though, he knew. It was the ship. Grant alerted a deep self-preservation program when he blew open the corridor segment. The Blind Man was awake; the ship was protecting itself. As the bot rolled toward him, tool arm extended, grasping the same weapon that shot Grant, Redmond looked at Grant’s vital signs one more time. Were they flat, or was there the tiniest twitch in all of them? Would the ship kill them, or was it only putting them to sleep for the rest of the crew to deal with?

He didn’t try to dodge, but even as he surrendered he couldn’t help shuddering. The beetle-backed bot, its tiny vid eyes shining, seemed nearly alive. And it paused. Why did it pause if it wasn’t to savor the moment?

Redmond stared at it, and it stared back. Only the sentient gloat.

The bot fired.

And if you don’t believe this lie is true,

Ask the blind man, he saw it, too.

ECHOING

T
he semi’s engine roared steadily while the heater poured warmth on Laird’s ankles. His headlights cut into the snowstorm, flakes coming hard. He rubbed his eyes and stifled a yawn. There hadn’t been another truck or car for the last hour on the long stretch of I-25 between Trinidad and Albuquerque, but he wasn’t surprised. Christmas Eve in a snowstorm, who would be moving then?

The road unfolded. No tracks. Every twenty seconds or so he passed a highway reflector on his right. He moved the truck closer to the middle, or at least what he hoped was the middle. Snow dove from the darkness, slashing straight toward him, blindingly white. His knuckles ached from gripping the steering wheel. It had started snowing when he pulled out of Denver after dinner, soft at first, and glowing in the late afternoon light. The radio had played an instrumental medley of carols. Laird hummed along, thinking about his family waiting in Albuquerque. After he checked the shipment in at the warehouse, he would climb into his car and drive home in plenty of time to be awakened by the kids. Denver to Albuquerque: eight hours on a good night.

Laird downshifted, but the snow swept in just as hard, erasing distance. Sometimes it didn’t look like snow coming toward him; it looked more like streaks of darkness exploding from a black center, wiping out the white. He blinked and shook his head. If this were a normal storm on any other night, he could find a pullout, park the truck and sleep until dawn, but the last weather report he’d heard said highways were closing behind him. They’d stopped traffic between Denver and Colorado Springs twenty minutes after he’d traveled that route. “Looks like our first big winter storm, folks,” the DJ said.

Laird twiddled the radio dial. Nothing but static now. Most times he picked up stations the whole way.

Last year a trucker froze to death in a pullout thirty miles from Taos. No CB, just like him. No cell phone. The storm closed the road, and two days later when the plows broke through, they found him wrapped in a sleeping bag in his truck’s cabin. Laird hunched over the steering wheel. They weren’t going to find him like that because he wasn’t going to stop. Nothing would prevent him from getting home to his kids.

Still, the snow shot from the darkness. When he switched on his brights, it was worse. He thought about being alone, about the long distance. What if, he thought, the snow wasn’t snow at all, but stars? What if I were flying through the galaxy, passing stars . . .

. . . passing stars? Watch Commander Tremaine shook his head. For a moment the flying stars in the viewvid made him think of snow, but he hadn’t seen snow for the last third of his life. What he’d seen instead, between long sleeps, were representations of stars scooting through the wall-covering viewvid during the long journey from one edge of the galaxy to the other, 100,000 light years, past one hundred billion stars at 2,000 times the speed of light.

He checked the [M]-space figures again. This couldn’t be right! He refigured them. The ship didn’t know where it was. Through the mental interface the computer wailed, scared into incoherence. Sometime while he’d been sleeping, they’d been thrown off course. Stars zipped by. Some swelled, became perceptibly larger. How close were the stars coming? The ship was off course! Tremaine shuddered. Even in [M]-space, they could not go
through
a star. The collision would create a spectacular display, destroying not only the star, but swallowing up its neighbors. The ship was supposed to slip
between
the stars. Their course had been designed for that. The passengers slumbering in the long-sleep cots in the holds depended on that, and so did he. After the long trip was done, he would find a place in the cots himself for the return voyage home where his family waited.

He broke open the emergency console, concentrating on the scores of steps necessary to slow the ship, to bring it below light speed where it could recalibrate itself. Be calm, he thought to the computer, and its keening voice silenced for the moment. Tremaine didn’t look up. He watched his hands instead. Anything so he wouldn’t see the cascading stars. He could almost hear them: deep gravitational wells and surging gases compressed to unimaginable density at their cores. They hissed in his imagination as they went by. As he worked, he wondered if the star that would kill them all would be visible. Might he have a chance to see it, appearing as small as the others at first, then growing out and out in the vidview’s display as the computer scrambled to keep up with the data it was representing? Would he have time to flinch?

He’d quit working. His gaze locked on the viewvid. Stars appeared from nowhere, still at first, picking up speed as they moved from the center. His eye caught on one, followed it until it vanished to his left. Picked up another, followed it too, until it missed. A beautiful representation, if it weren’t so dangerous. Of course, if he really could look out a window, he wouldn’t see anything. Light in [M]-space wasn’t light anymore. Nothing his senses could respond to existed in [M]-space, and what he thought of as the ship’s movement was only a metaphor for what was happening. His understanding of [M]-space itself was metaphoric. It changed reality and the perception of reality. Still, the computer showed him a starfield, the ship rushing forward, a thousand near misses a minute.

Tremaine breathed hard. What would it be like to see one appear and never move, only grow? He felt like a child for an instant, staring forward, mesmerized. The sense that he was someone else, someone younger, a girl, gripped him. He shook his head. What if just for once, the screen changed . . .

. . . the screen changed. Brianna flinched. For a second the pixels spreading to the edge of the screen didn’t look like pixels to her anymore: not plain white specks on a flat black background (her dad’s 17-inch flat screen monitor), but glowing, moving, 3-dimensional diamonds, and the black wasn’t screen-black; it was palpable black. She let go of the monitor, then fell back into Dad’s leather office chair. For a second, she’d been someone else: a man, panicked at a console, afraid, so afraid. Afraid of what? Brianna breathed hard in the dark room. Through the closed door she could hear the Christmas party. Aunt Agnes sang something off tune. Her brother, Ray, played the piano in accompaniment. He was so much better than Agnes that he made her almost sound good.

Brianna rubbed her eyes. She played the screensaver game often. Once after smoking some of Ray’s stash. Once when she’d snuck home from school to miss a sophomore English test on
Julius Caesar
. Mostly when she wanted to get away. Her therapist had asked her once what her personal motto was. “Everyone has a motto. It’s what guides them in how they behave in the world. Mine is ‘Make everything right.’ I struggle with that,” said the therapist, a perky woman who rubbed her cheek when she paused between words. Brianna wondered if the cheek ever became chapped. “So what’s
your
motto, Brianna?”

Without thinking, Brianna said, “Ignore them, and they’ll go away.” And what she thought was, it’s about isolation. It’s about not connecting to anyone or anything, like Sylvia Plath who wrote a poem describing her stay in a hospital after a suicide attempt. Plath liked the sterility of the room. She despaired when friends brought her flowers because they broke up the porcelain and steel solace of white walls and shiny, tiled floors. Brianna loved that poem. “I’m an eyeball on a pillow,” said Brianna to the silent screen, “just observing.” Plath tried an overdose to kill herself. Brianna rested her hand on the drawer in her dad’s desk where she’d put the baggie full of barbiturates. Light blue capsules with pink logos. Ten times more than the job required.

The door to the study opened behind her. Brianna pulled her arms close, hiding in the office chair. The door closed. She’d already taken a dozen pills. If they found her now, it would be too soon. The pill’s acrid bite lingered in the back of her throat.

“I don’t know where she is,” said her father. “She’s going to miss the eggnog.”

Brianna sighed in relief. If it wasn’t the eggnog, it would be the popcorn balls, and if it wasn’t that, it would be the Christmas video. Probably
It’s a Wonderful Life
again or
White Christmas
, which wasn’t nearly as good as
A Muppet’s Christmas Carol
that they never watched, even though she asked for it every year.

On the screen, the stars seemed different again, sweeping away from the vanishing point in the monitor’s center. Brianna leaned forward. The room felt cold, her chair rigid, and the stars came too fast, too fast by half. She gasped for breath. It couldn’t be the pills working already. She’d just taken them. The screen game was about going somewhere else, leaving her life, but it had never
worked
so well. These weren’t pixels. They weren’t even stars anymore. She cocked her head to the side. What were they? Snow? Her breath came out in a visible plume. Was a window open? That couldn’t be it, or she would be freezing. For a second she could feel a winter’s coat on her arms, her hands gripped a steering wheel, her foot reached forward to find a brake pedal. There was too much speed. It was dangerous. She had to slow down. Where was the brake . . .

. . . where was the brake? Laird pressed so slowly. The wheel squirmed under his hands. It must be pure ice beneath the snow, and his headlights didn’t show what waited on either side. Ditch or cliff, it didn’t matter; the shoulder that would grip his tires and send him into a deadly jackknife threatened more. Gently he pumped the brake. A reflector appeared on his right, so he was on the highway—for a second he hadn’t been sure—and he still could be home for Christmas morning, but he’d have to be oh so careful. The speedometer needle crept downwards: thirty miles per hour, twenty-five, twenty. He downshifted, letting the clutch creep out so as not to break the tires’ traction with the road. Now the snow swirled, no longer diving toward his windshield, but twisting in the headlights. The snow wasn’t that deep. No more than a few inches. If he could make his way from reflector to reflector, he could find his way home.

His watch said 3:30. Five hours until dawn. At this speed he’d make Albuquerque by . . . he checked his watch again. How long ago had he gone through Trinidad? He remembered the lights at the edge of town, blurred by the whirling storm, and Raton Pass, he was pretty sure . . . yes, Raton Pass for sure, but had he made Maxwell yet? It was only another twenty-five miles or so. Had he gone through? He shook his head. Surely he had. But what was the last exit he’d seen? So many little towns off the highway: Springer and Colmor, Levy and Wagon Mound. He knew he hadn’t reached Wagon Mound yet.

Laird leaned forward, pressing his chest against the wheel, close to the windshield. I-25 was a broad road, clearly marked. There was no way he could be lost, but he thought about the way exit lanes curved off so gradually, and they were lined with reflectors too. Could he be heading away from Albuquerque? He tried to picture the map. What if he’d taken the Springer exit without realizing it, and he was headed east now instead of south? No way to tell, and nobody would know where he’d gone. If only he’d pass a sign, a lighted building, a marker of any kind.

He thought, should I stop? At least now I’m still on the road. The engine will idle for twelve or thirteen hours. Plenty of heat. Surely someone will come along before then (but what if this isn’t I-25? What if I’ve lost the interstate and this is state highway 56? Eighty miles of empty back road that never gets plowed).

He stretched away from the wheel. The backs of his arms hurt, and he realized his jaw was clenched. What can you do if you’re lost except to press on and look for a landmark? Through the steering wheel, he could feel the road, still slicker than slick . . .

. . . Watch Commander Tremaine wiped the sweat off his forehead, slicker than slick. The ship was slowing. He imagined the eddy of [M]-space behind them, like a boat’s wake, spreading evenly from their passage, washing up against the stars. The psychic disruption wouldn’t matter. Life was so rare that a million systems wouldn’t feel the ripple, but he’d never heard of a ship slowing as fast as he was slowing his. Tortured reality could be catching up to them now. He watched his hands. Were they blurring at the edges? He glanced up. The stars weren’t coming toward him anymore; they gyrated in their paths, curving randomly. [M]-space
was
catching them. How could he trust anything he saw or did? Even his thoughts could become scattered, the neurons flowing unpredictably. The confusion was already there: for an instant he thought he was a young girl; for a blink he was driving down a long, snowy road. Or was it confusion? Could he be close to a world with sentient life, connecting to them through the no-space of faster-than-light travel? Causality stripped away. Trembling [M]-space turning distance into concepts no farther apart that two thoughts.

He pictured the passengers, helpless in their cots. What dreams could [M]-space’s backwash cause them? Would they sense his fear? Would that be the last thing they knew, his fear quivering on disaster’s edge? How could he find their way home?

Tremaine held a sob close in his throat. He didn’t have to see the controls to slow the ship. He’d trained through the procedure a thousand times. He let his reflexes take over. Fear didn’t matter if he kept moving. But the ship would know that he was scared. It would respond.

Now the starfield slowed, or maybe his perceptions speeded up? No, no, they had to be going slower now; he’d completed so many steps. He closed his eyes. Just feel my hands, he thought. Fingers on controls. Push this one. Slide this one over. Listen to the calibrations reset. I want to go home. Everything must be done right so I can go home. Where am I?

Through the mental interface, Tremaine felt the computer struggle. A trillion stars! It needed an orientation, a landmark, a point of view to start a search. How long would it cast about in its memory trying to find a match? Laird could grow old and die while it sorted through the images, the old star charts.

Tremaine imagined his wife, a tall woman waiting at the edge of the woods where they’d met. At night they looked at the stars, and in the day everything was green. He could smell trees, so pungent, green on green, he could smell it, and there was music . . .